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I’ve received a couple of requests for an example of using a
post migration script with nimadm .
What follows is a simple example of using such a resource with NIM. If you are
not familiar with the nimadm tool then
perhaps you’d like to start first by reading my article on using nimadm to migrate to AIX 6.1. The nimadm utility
can perform both pre and post migration tasks. This is accomplished by running
NIM scripts either before or after a migration. The tool accepts the following
flags for pre and post migration script resources: ... [More]

At the IBM Technical Symposium in Sydney last week, a person approached me to discuss NIM and some of its capabilities. During the conversation we discussed how NIM could be used to copy files from the NIM master to its NIM clients. I promised to send them some information on how to achieve this ASAP. They were smart and followed up with an email the next day! They’d even tried to configure this on their systems but hit a small problem. "Hello Chris, So trying to push out a new netbackup tar file to one of our nim... [More]

Do you use SSL with nimsh on AIX? No? Well, you might want to consider it. If you regularly use LPM to migrate AIX partitions from one server to another, you may have found that, on occasion , your NIM master has trouble communicating with its NIM clients afterwards. This is by design, as nimsh uses the NIM clients cpuid to authenticate with the NIM master. During an LPM operation, the cpuid of the NIM client changes and its possible the NIM master may reject the client as a result. This problem can occur even when CPU validation is disabled on... [More]

On the odd occasion, NIM may report that a resource is allocated to a NIM client, when, in fact, it is not. Typically, you’d check that the resource was, in fact, not allocated for use to any NIM client and if it was, you would reset the client; and this would resolve the issue. But if that doesn’t work, you may need to take an additional action to resolve the problem. This doesn’t happen very often but it can frustrate you when it does. Here’s an example of the problem. I try to remove an lpp_source resource but... [More]

There’s a new NIM HTTP service handler included with AIX 7.2 (due for release next month, December 2015). This new service is designed “…….to help Clients better conform to emerging data center policies restricting the use of NFS, NIM will now have support to apply updates to AIX or install new packages over HTTPs. Initial AIX installs will still require the use of NFS version 3 or the more secure NFS version 4 protocol. In addition to fileset installs, NIM customization activities such as script... [More]

After
updating my NIM master to AIX 7.1 TL2 SP1 (7100-02-01-1245), I noticed a
problem. Whenever I installed a new AIX partition using NIM, the resources
allocated to the NIM client were not being de-allocated, even though the installation was completing successfully. Also,
if I tried to run my usual ‘NIM client reset’ script (below), the resources
were still allocated. #!/usr/bin/ksh # Reset a
NIM client. if [[
"$1" = "" ]] ; then echo Please specify a NIM client to reset
e.g. aixlpar1. else if lsnim -l $1... [More]

Recent releases of AIX installation media
(for 7.1 and 6.1) now contain the OpenSSH base installation filesets. This is
very handy; we no longer need to download or locate the software from other
sources. One thing to consider is what this means
for future AIX migrations. If you are migrating a system (that already
has a version of SSH installed) to AIX 7.1 then you may notice that the first
time you attempt to connect to the server (after the 7.1 migration) the
following ssh message appears: root@nim1
: / # ssh aixlpar1... [More]

On more than one occasion I’ve written articles and blogs on how to migrate AIX systems to a new version of the AIX operating system. You can find a list these articles (and others) here . Each of the NIM articles focuses on migrating AIX systems (which are configured as NIM clients). The approach is always the same; use a NIM master to migrate the NIM clients to the next release of AIX. What they don’t discuss is how to migrate your NIM master to a new version of the OS. This is the very first step you should take before you... [More]

Whilst working with one of my AIX customers recently I discovered a problem with NIMSH and SSL. The customer had updated their NIM master from AIX 7.1 TL4 SP1 to AIX 7.1 TL4 SP3 . After the SP update, any attempt to connect to a NIM client (over NIMSH+SSL), from the NIM master, would simply hang. For example, we tried to list the filesets on the NIM client with this command, which never returned any output. [root@750lpar4]/ # nim -o lslpp 750lpar9 The /var/adm/ras/nimsh.log file, on the NIM client, showed that the NIMSH session... [More]

In my previous post on AIX Live Updates I discussed how to use the geninstall command to perform a non-disruptive (ifix) update on an AIX system. In this post I wanted to show you how to perform the same task using NIM. NIM can be used to start an AIX Live Update operation on a target machine (NIM client) either from a NIM master or from the NIM client itself (with nimclient ). Note: The AIX Live Update operation started by NIM calls the hmcauth command during the cust operation to authenticate to the NIM client with the HMC by... [More]

I was contacted recently by a customer who was attempting to restore an AIX 5.3 Versioned WPAR (VWPAR) from backup using NIM. The restore worked OK but the data was restored to the wrong volume group! When the VWPAR was created, the –g option was specified with mkwpar to force the creation of the VWPAR file systems in a separate volume group (named wparvg) rather than the default location of the Global root volume group (rootvg). # mkwpar - g wparvg -n p8vw2 -B /cg/53gibbo.mksysb -C -O Running lsvg against... [More]

I received the following errors whilst running dsh on a NIM master recently. root@nim1 : / # dsh -waixlpar1 date 0042-053 lsnim: there is no NIM object named "aixlpar1" The node aixlpar1 is not defined in NIM database. aixlpar1: Mon Aug 4 14:01:57 EET 2014 I had to set the following environment variable, shown below. By setting DSH_CONTEXT to DSH this prevented the dsh command from referring to the NIM database and instead forced it to query a user-defined node list. root@nim1 : / # export DSH_CONTEXT=DSH... [More]

It’s no secret that I like
NIM. I’ve written about NIM on several occasions, in Redbooks, technical
articles and on my blog. It’s a great tool for installing and maintaining AIX. Occasionally
though, it can throw you an unusual error or two when things go wrong. For the uninitiated
resolving these errors can be challenging. Here’s a couple of NIM
related questions I received recently. Both are troubleshooting queries. “I'm getting the following error when trying
to create a NIM lpp_source for AIX 6.1” : ... [More]

OK, so I had
a NIM master with two network interfaces, en0 and en1. The en0 interface was connected
to the 192.168.10.0 network and the en1 interface was connected to the 10.1.1.0 network. When the
master was initially configured, we chose en0 as the primary install interface.
The master could now install NIM clients on the 192.168.10.0 network, without
any additional NIM network configuration. root@nim1 /
# ifconfig –a en0:... [More]

WARNING! Let me make this perfectly clear! The procedure that is shown below is NOT SUPPORTED by IBM. If you choose to follow these procedures, DO NOT contact IBM support for help. They will not be able to assist you. They will ask you to change the nimsh port numbers back to the defaults. They will ask you to change your SAP application to use a different port number. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Here’s a problem I’ve encountered more than once. Someone installs SAP onto an AIX system and decides to use TCP port 3901... [More]